Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Muthologos: Charles Olson and the Paris Review interviews

For many days now, social networkers have been applauding Lorin Stein and the new regime of The Paris Review for making all of the famed PR interviews, generated by previous incarnations of the journal, available for free online. I imagine most people realize the way in which these interviews were constructed; they are not straightforward sit-down, real-time interviews. As Mr. Stein recently explained the process:

"In the first place, the method is slow. My interview with Jonathan Lethem took a couple of weeks, with reading assignments before each session. Joshua Pashman's interview with Norman Rush, coming out in the September issue, took three years, eight sessions, and 500 pages of transcript. (Later boiled down to 33 pages in print.)

In the second place, the interviews are collaborative. After our interns type up the transcripts, the interviewer and subject sit down and edit them—together. Often they rewrite the questions and answers completely. When Frederick Seidel interviewed Robert Lowell, the tape recorder didn't work: Fred wrote up the whole thing from memory, then gave it to Lowell to revise."

The interviews are terrific, as far as such things go (see here for my reservations about interviews, generally) but I suppose we're obliged to take them with a few grains of salt. Mr. Stein explains that "When writers have total control, George [Plimpton] realized, they feel safe. And when they feel safe they open up." But there's another, fascinating, side of that coin.

Talonbooks has just issued a new and completely revised edition of Charles Olson's Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews, edited by famed Olson scholar, Ralph Maud - picking up where the book's standard-setting earlier editor, George Butterick, left off. The book includes Olson's extremely peculiar Paris Review interview, conducted by Gerard Malanga, which can be read in its first-published form here. As it appeared in the magazine, it makes for uncomfortable reading. But here's what Maud says of it in a note to the version he prints in the new collection:

"It was very gratifying to be able to get a proper version of this interview, or kitchen discussion, into print in Muthologos. The original attempt published in the Paris Review 40 (1970) was totally unsatisfactory (there is nothing at all to recommend it). Unfortunately, that version with all its flaws has been included in the Paris Review omnibus volume, Beat Writers at Work (Modern Library, 1999), extending to a new readership this old defamation of the poet.

The [original] Muthologos version was made possible by my receiving four tapes through the good offices of Jeremy Prynne. Two of the participants, Harvey Brown and Gerrit Lansing, listened through the tapes with me and elucidated many difficulties. Many remained, and the Muthologos version chose to pass them silently by rather than burden the reader with too many uncertainties. More digging has been done since then over the years, so the present transcription is much augmented. In addition, in 1992, Charles Watts of the Simon Fraser Contemporary Literation [sic] Collection became alerted to the fact that a fifth tape had been deposited by Malanga at Texas; he made a trip there and transcribed the tale for the Minutes of the Charles Olson Society 2 (June 1993). His text appears [in this new edition of Muthologos] edited to conform to the format of the rest of the volume."

The interview - more a long chat session - as transcribed in Muthologos remains a strange and challenging read. But we can be thankful for the editorial work done here to make restorations and corrections to the transcript. This new edition is lovely, essential for anybody interested in Olson; and especially revealing to read in juxtaposition with the Paris Review interviews now available online.

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MALANGA: You can't want to see the future on this tape.

OLSON: Oh yes, I can, because I can talk right to the tape right now, because, like that sleeper, I'm very fresh, I just woke up.

I think that the Olson Paris review interview is better attempted after having read a large portion of his work, maximus poems or not. I have always seen his responses as an intentional attempt at an unconditioned yet directed, in some manner, flow of phrases - much like his poetry.

DON SHARE

"Don Share is a poet and polymath extraordinaire and a great gift to the literary scene at large." - Aram Saroyan

About Wishbone (from Black Sparrow): "The most soulful book I've read in a long, long time." - Alice Fulton

"Don Share's work is compressed as a haiku, intent as a tanka, witty as a sonnet, witless as a song, relentless as an expose, patter without pretension...his elegant poetry, exposed as a haiku, expansive as a renga, boisterous as a bridge, happy as Delmore Schwartz with Lou Reed and vice versa, vivacious as the living day, sustained like a whole note, clipped as a grace note, loving various and shrewd as a thingist, soapy as Ponge, delightful as light, dedefining as a new rite, built out of attention, music and sight." - David Shapiro

"Squandermania is a book of associative delight, even when the poems are at their most grave. They combine the obliquity of Mina Loy, the incantatory freshness of Roethke, and even Plath’s devotion to nursery rhyme to leaven the book’s prevailing tones of irony, sorrow, and regret. The poet’s awareness of how daily life refuses to cohere into a consoling pattern is beautifully mirrored by his conviction that language itself signals a fall from grace and unity and emotional wholeness. And yet the poet keeps faith with language by allowing language to drive the poems, even as the poet’s occasions and subject matter are grounded in what Hopkins called 'the in-earnestness of speech.'" - Tom Sleigh

About Union: "Few poets manage such dexterous and fresh music. Few books are as lovely or profound." - Alice Fulton

"Brimming with heart and intelligence... confirmation of Don Share’s stature in American letters. Evidenced by a return to his debut collection, he’s been at the summit from the beginning." - William Wright, Oxford American

"Don Share's earnest, moving first volume, Union, represents the promising next stage in so-called Southern narrative poetry. Share writes clear, well-crafted page-long poems about romance, memory and separation ("our house tocks and ticks/ like an inherited clock whose hour hand sticks"). He may, however, achieve greater recognition for longer work (like "Pax Americana") in which his own stories join those of Memphis, Tennessee and of the Civil War's difficult, lingering guilt: "Where the United States ends/ and begins// The Mississippi is/ a long American wound." - Publishers Weekly

"I delight in the precision of these chiseled poems and in the sizeable, important ambition of Share's imagination." - David Baker

"Union is a tour de force, establishing Share’s credentials as well as his poetic voice." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"... something special. I hadn't known his poetry at all; it is brilliant." - Eric Ormsby

"The poetry of Don Share expresses many tensions between Memphis past and Memphis present, much like the novels and short stories of Peter Taylor." - Wanda Rushing, Memphis and the Paradox of Place: Globalization in the American South

About Miguel Hernandez: "There is a sense of shared elation between reader and translator that confirms the delight of exact sensation when the poems feel transmitted by that cautious and subtle alchemy that is the translator's skill. I have felt this with Don Share's versions of Miguel Hernandez: but this is also because he is a fine poet in his own right, one who surrenders his sensibilities to the task of transference." - Derek Walcott

"Share manages to make Hernández-in-English dazzle, bringing readers closer to the poet's sense of language and meaning." - Huffington Post

About Bunting's Persia: Guardian Book of the Year, 2012 and Paris Review staff pick!

"Both the publishing house and the book’s editor Don Share have done an excellent job: a slim and attractive book, a chronological poet-by-poet running order, and a fine introduction by Share, full of details about Bunting’s curious life." - Bookslut

"I read it on Valentine’s Day." - Lorin Stein

"Virtuoso writing by any standard... deserves to be famous." - The Hudson Review

"Bunting's Persia is a delight..." - Alastair Johnston, Booktryst

About The Traumatophile: "Trenchant, smart-ass, broken-hearted, hantée, swoony, maudlin, mordant, sinister, gloomy, goofy, eyes open and counting every penny, these are. And inspiring. How many poems can you say that about, anymore?" - The Unreliable Narrator blog